It will come as no surprise that a professor like myself says that lack of education in how to use the social networks is the problem here: if the only tool you have is a hammer, every problem is a nail… but I believe that this is a problem that has been growing for a long time, while education has barely changed over the last decades. In short, our education systems work along the same lines as those of our parents and grandparents: we study textbooks, memorize and then regurgitate their contents in an exam.

We continue to operate on the basis that knowledge is stored in repositories, usually a book or an teacher. This dependence on textbooks has distorted education, and made it vulnerable to indoctrination. But, above all, textbooks make us dependent on a specific source of information, preventing us from developing our own criteria. The only places where people are taught how to search for information are on Information Sciences and Journalism courses. In an age when we are inundated with information, students more than ever need those search skills.

The sad truth is that we tend to believe whatever we see on a screen, accept the first result a search engine gives us, and are only too willing to share things on social networks, perhaps in the hope of increasing our popularity. If we see something that attracts our attention or that coincides with our world view, we share it, usually without checking it first. And of course, if everybody is sharing something, then it must be true, right? But as we have seen in the 2016 US elections, this built-in vulnerability of the social networkshas been successfully exploited, while the real culprits are not bots and fake accounts managed in the Balkans or Russia, but our collective naivety.

Which is why we have to stop seeing textbook as repositories of truth. Education, from primary school on, should be about developing the skills to search for and qualify information online. Students have to be taught that the truth is not to be found in the pages of this or that book, but instead is out there, and can be found if we take the time and use the necessary skills. This is a topic I have written about repeatedly:don’t just digitalize textbooks; kill them off.

Learning today means managing ever-growing amounts of information and being able to sort the wheat from the chaff, it means using multiple sources and accepting that the teacher is simply another knowledge node, and one that is perfectly open to question. Knowledge has to cease being something that can be manipulated commercially or politically, and it certainly can’t be decided on by parents or teachers, who will have their own biases. Schools must help children to understand that a book, a teacher, a newspaper, a government or their parents can never be their sole source of knowledge, because knowledge is out there in the world, evolving. The metaphor of teaching somebody how to fish, rather than giving them food, has never been more relevant.

Technology isn’t going to help us solve the root problem of our willingness to share fake news. That will only come about through education. Technology can help limit the spread of fake news by detecting diffusion patterns, but humans will be required tofact check: we’re never going to come up with a truth algorithms: that just runs the risk of repeating the same mistakes. It is only by adapting our education systems, and now, to the changing times we live in that we will stop the spread of fake news.